“There, mother,” she said, “now you can pack in this box all the old lumber of all sorts which you want to carry.  And, if this box isn’t large enough, you shall have two more.  Don’t tire yourself out:  there’s plenty of time; and, if you don’t get it all packed by the time I am done, I can help you.”

Then Mercy went downstairs feeling half-guilty, as one does when one has practised a subterfuge on a child.

How many times that poor old woman packed and unpacked that box, nobody could dream.  All day long she trotted up and down, up and down; ransacking closets, chests, barrels; sorting and resorting, and forgetting as fast as she sorted.  Now and then she would come across something which would rouse an electric chain of memories in the dim chambers of her old, worn-out brain, and she would sit motionless for a long time on the garret floor, in a sort of trance.  Once Mercy found her leaning back against a beam, with her knees covered by a piece of faded blue Canton crape, on which her eyes were fastened.  She did not speak till Mercy touched her shoulder.

“Oh, my! how you scared me, child!” she exclaimed.  “D’ye see this ere blue stuff?  I hed a gown o’ thet once:  it was drefful kind o’ clingy stuff.  I never felt exzackly decent in it, somehow:  it hung a good deal like a night-gownd; but your father he bought it for the color.  He traded off some shells for it in some o’ them furrin places.  You wouldn’t think it now, but it used to be jest the color o’ a robin’s egg or a light-blue ‘bachelor’s button;’ and your father he used to stick one o’ them in my belt whenever they was in blossom, when I hed the gownd on.  He hed a heap o’ notions about things matchin’.  He brought me that gownd the v’yage he made jest afore Caleb was born; and I never hed a chance to wear it much, the children come so fast.  It warn’t re’ly worn at all, ‘n’ I hed it dyed black for veils arterwards.”

It was from this father who used to “stick” pale-blue flowers in his wife’s belt, and whose love of delicate fabrics and tints made him courageous enough to lead her draped in Canton crape into the unpainted Cape Cod meeting-house, where her fellow-women bristled in homespun, that Mercy inherited all the artistic side of her nature.  She knew this instinctively, and all her tenderest sentiment centred around the vague memory she retained of a tall, dark-bearded man, who, when she was only three years old, lifted her in his arms, called her his “little Mercy,” and kissed her over and over again.  She was most loyally affectionate to her mother, but the sentiment was not a wholly filial one.  There was too much reversal of the natural order of the protector and the protected in it; and her life was on too different a plane of thought, feeling, and interest from the life of the uncultured, undeveloped, childish, old woman.  Yet no one who saw them together would have detected any trace of this shortcoming in Mercy’s feeling towards her mother.  She had in her nature